[BobSaysHi]

Quote:

Tinnitus is a sound your brain creates too. It's level can be so low that you can only hear it in very silent rooms.
And of course, if suddenly all you can hear is this ringing and therefore concentrate on it ...

I think I have tinnitus, but after reading this thread I'm not sure. My room is 100% silent at night and I hear ringing. When I plug my ears the ringing continues. I used to listen to insane volume levels (it was a result of your typical metal MOAR LOUDER, and a lack of knowledge on hearing loss). My hearing is sill really detailed, so I'm not sure if this is the case.

 

[xnor]

Same here bob, but mine was triggered by a cold. Most of the time I don't even notice it, just in very quiet places. Doc said ignore it, I'm fine with that heh.
Afaik it is tinnitus and produced by the brain for reasons unknown. It's always there but you don't notice it at everyday work.
 
Oh by the way, to high sensitivity (e.g. as a result of using ear plugs to fall asleep etc.) can be the cause too. 

 

[Jema]

Well, yes - tinnitus is a brain-induced symptom of a condition, and can arise from various things. I should have specified that I was referring to tinnitus as a result of noise-induced hearing loss, when there is damage to the stereocilia, the hair cells that ultimately transform the physical waves of sound into signals to the brain.
 
So what I was wondering is, if a person with absolutely no hearing loss or other damage to the outer or inner ear was to be deprived of outer audio stimuli, would the brain then create tinnitus as some sort of response to this? Or does everybody have a low level of tinnitus that is masked by everyday sounds?
 
Quote:

 Tinnitus is a sound your brain creates too. It's level can be so low that you can only hear it in very silent rooms. And of course, if suddenly all you can hear is this ringing and therefore concentrate on it ...
 

 

 

[RPGWiZaRD]

Well I also notice this slightly in VERY silent rooms but it doesn't sound like tinnitus as I've been quite careful with volume but I think it's more what explained that the brain is accustomised to hearing some noise and tries making up for it. I'm a comp hardware nerd and I've slept next to my comp with it running day and night for MAAAANY years (10~12 years maybe) so my ears rarely get a completely silent environment and I think this is the reason I might "think" I'm hearing something in a silent room, yea it's more like "imaginary" noise than actual noise in my case as it depends how much I focus on it etc and can't or can barely notice it at all if I don't focus on trying to hear anything.

 

[Nachash]

I think I have tinnitus, but after reading this thread I'm not sure. My room is 100% silent at night and I hear ringing. When I plug my ears the ringing continues. I used to listen to insane volume levels (it was a result of your typical metal MOAR LOUDER, and a lack of knowledge on hearing loss). My hearing is sill really detailed, so I'm not sure if this is the case.

You can have tinnitus even without any hearing loss.

 

[SP Wild]

Thank goodness for this thread!  Before joining head-fi, I always noticed that when it was quite, at times I registered a ringing noise, but thought nothing of it.
 
Then I joined head-fi and came across this word "tinnitus" for which I paid no attention to as I had no idea what it meant and the term sounded like defective hearing for which I never suspected that I had...then I read about hearing ringing in silence and this was the meaning of tinnitus...
 
Then I heard this ringing more, sometimes very loudly, more than usual...even though my listening habits have always been the same.  Still the paranoia persists and I was ready to accept that I have a "tinnitus".
 
I'm pretty sure tonight I will be cured, and these noises won't bother me the slightest no more.  Thank goodness for that.

 

[xnor]

 

[maverickronin]

Some tinnitus is thought to come from the nerve cells in your inner ear going into oscillation and not just noise that your brain is making up itself.

 

[ThEadventurer]

Your brain sends sensory signals, it makes its own sounds since you are not used to silence, don't worry, its normal, if you dont have a history of tinnitus.

 

[dlwilladsen]

+1 tinnitus ... probably caused by loud, annoying music played in every eating establishment.

 

[chewy4]

Ha, I don't think that there are many resaurants playing music at tinnitus inducing levels.
 
My tinnitus, while the root cause is very likely one too many ekoostik Hookah concerts(some of which I would have been considered legally deaf the night of), was triggered by the drug tramadol. There's a lot of weird ways it can come to surface, it's not really an all that well understood condition.

 

[anetode]

Tinnitus in quiet environments occurs because of the adjustment of the neural feedback loop responsible for "gain", sensitivity of the hair cells. These cells produce noise, i.e. electrical impulses, all the time, however the brain dynamically adjusts sensitivity to filter them out. It's analogous to being in a really dark room: once your eyes adjust to the darkness, everything appears kind of grainy because you're asking so much of your rod cells that you "tune-in" to the noise floor.
 
It's difficult to accept the notion of your mind-body mechanism being subject to such simple limitations, not just on a creeped-out level but so much so that during sensory deprivation your brain eventually chooses to create its own subjective reality.

 

[Ervin Tartaraj]

Hey man , i come from the future , cus ive als heard about tinnitus like a few weeks ago ... and then i realized that every time i go to sleep if i notice carefully or sometimes not .. i hear this ringing sound , when it's quiet though ... and ive had it since a loooong time ago iirc ... and was worried if i had tinnitus recently since i heard of it ... i thought everyone had that .... if it is tinnitus i could live with it , but what worries me though is if it can actually get worse ... and i wanna ask u what has happened to you after all these years ; is it still the same or has it gotten worse? :/

 

[441879]

When I'm in a very quiet room I hear ringing, but it's very high pitched (well north of 10 kHz). When I've been exposed to extremely loud noises (concert, diesel power plants, etc) I've heard ringing but at much lower frequency (say 5000 Hz). My assumption (based on no research) was the lower frequency was tinnitus and the really high frequency notice is the noise floor of what I could hear. The HF ringing is barely perceptible in a quiet room but quite noticeable in a anechoic chamber. When I last had my hearing tested (I think they went to 16khz but I could be wrong) the ringing was a little lower pitched than the test tone.

 

[lawlbear]

Ha thats pretty neat, never been in a soundproof room.